Zero Gravity at ABS Youth Nationals

Tuesday, 12 March 2013

Last week, The Touchstone Zero Gravity team climbed at the USA Climbing ABS Youth National Championships.

Zero Gravity brought home the Silver medal as a team, missing the Gold by only 34 points! In the individual categories, they had six podiums and USA National Team bids! On top of that, Zero Gravity had four National Champions!

The competition was held in Colorado Springs, in the heart of the US Olympic Training center, on March 1-3. "The past ten years that the ABS National Championships have been hosted, the level of athletic ability has risen exponentially," said Jenerik, who had been bringing climbers every year. Just as the Open Nationals held the week before, Youth Nationals had the strongest field of competitors in the history of the event.
"We are extremely proud of exceptional composure and professional attitude the entire team exhibited," said Jenerik.

Congratulations to our National Champions Cicada Jenerik, Joshua Levin, Connor Everton and Mirko Caballero! The wins were especially gratifying to Cicada and Josh as this was their last Youth bouldering competition. "It was a great way to end my last year at Youth Nationals," said Cicada. Both have been competing at ABS Nationals since the youth series started in 2004, and have both won the National Championship title five times.

The next generation of Touchstone Climbers shows little sign of slowing down with 12 year old Mirko wining his third straight National Bouldering title.

The rest of the team also had an exceptional showing with Matt Grossman receiving the Silver, and Natalia Grossman the Bronze. Ethan Rogers was 6th, Lauren Berry 8th, Seth Rogers 8th, Dylan Meyerhoffer 10th, Sera Busse 13th, Hannah Donnely 15th, Hana Grossman 19th, Alexa Nazarian 24th and Liam Vance 24th.

In addition, a special congratulations to Mirko Caballero, who was selected as a Rookie North Face Young Gun recipient. Here is a highlight reel so you can relive the magic - see if you can spot our Zero Gravity climbers!